Students Asked to Draw and Color Themselves as Slaves

By U.S. Department of Agriculture (20111013-OC-UNK-0005) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A mother in northwest Austin, Texas, is questioning why Four Points Middle School gave her 12-year-old daughter an assignment to draw and color a picture of herself as a slave.

“There’s nothing about slavery that I would want any child, regardless of color, to have to relive,” the girl’s mother, Tonya Jennings, told KVUE-TV.

When the seventh-grader came home from school, she took the assignment out of her backpack and showed her mom what it said on the last page.

“I turn it, and then, of course, my eye is drawn to the title, ‘Making Sense with the Senses.’ And then I read the four points. And I stopped after reading, ‘Draw a picture of yourself as a slave.’ I just stopped right there,” Jennings told KVUE.